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I’m going to ask you to stop doing commodity work as a solopreneur, it will kill your business. What Is Commodity Work It is products or services with a very low barrier to entry that can be created or offered very easily by lots of people. If you make a flugelbinder in western Europe, it can be made much more cheaply in China, that is commodity work. If you offer php coding in the states, it can be done for $5 per hour from India. If you offer website logo design, you can whip up on your own from sites such as logomaker.com that’s a commodity. They may not be the best products or services, but commodities are offered cheaply. If you offer commodity services you will attract the bargain basement customers and clients, these are the types of people who will make you…

There is really good business book called The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, it’s all about how we go about building small businesses and is well worth a read. One line in it really stands out where Gerber says: “Work on your business, not in it” What he is saying that we (as business owners) should be focusing our time on building our business and not doing the technical work that our business requires. He says hire people to work in your business and concentrate on working on your business to build it. I agree with this sentiment, but, how as solopreneurs can we put this into practise, we want to stay small and lean, and without us, the solo doing the technical work there is no business. I want to rephrase…

Sorry it’s been quiet around here for a few weeks. The reason for that is a business decision I took several years ago. I want to write a post that I ask you to take something to heart, and that is, that if you choose the wrong business model when you start your solo enterprise, you may regret it further down the line. Sensible business model selection from the get-go can save you lots of headaches once your business has grown. My project here at Solopreneurial.com has slipped because I have chosen the wrong business model for scale and growth in other areas of my business. There is only you in a solo enterprise so if you attention is all going in one direction, you can only do that one thing. Why I’ve Chosen The Wrong Business Model Over at…

I run a one man (read person if that term bugs you) multinational business, and we all can thanks to the leveling effect of the internet Internet Has Brought People Together The internet has brought people together like no other medium in the past, I can communicate with people across the planet at almost zero cost. There are tools that allow me to provide services as if they were sitting next to me, and other tools to take payment in their local currency and deposit it in my bank account with almost no effort. In short the world is my market, I’m a multinational player not a local small business, and I think you should build your soloporeneurial empire in the same way so you can tap into a huge global audience not a small sheltered local one. An Unusual…

I’ve just returned from a weeks holiday (read vacation if you are in the states) and it just got me thinking about the old holiday entitlement I used to get when I was employed and how I was allowed to use my entitlement. Holiday Entitlement Read that again, this is the number of holidays I am entitled to. I’m not sure if it’s the same setup where you live, but in the UK a salaried position comes with a number of none monetary benefits and one of them is a holiday entitlement. Ususally you start with 20 days you can take in a year and it may increased as a long serving bonus. We don’t get medical or dental packages or even need one, we love our free national health service, it’s brilliant, but we do expect a holiday package….

If you are planning to launch a new product, service, coaching program, software service or physical product the best way to do this is to give them what they want, not what you think they want. The Sound Of Crickets Chirping If you launch what you think they want without the input from your potential customers first, you are likely to be greeted by the sound of crickets chirping when you launch. Zero or few sales and a lot of time down the drain. It could be the greatest offering ever, but if it does not touch on the problems your people have, they will never get what you are trying to do. You may spend hundreds of hours building that membership site or writing your e-book only to find that it does scratch the itch that your people have….

Originally published at wpdude.com I’m not a problogger by any stretch of the imagination, I blog to support the WordPress Technical Support business I run here at WPDude. After four years of blogging I’ve been able to switch off all paid advertising and support a team of two (soon to be three techies) in more work than they can handle, all because of blogging. This post talks about how I’ve done this. It’s Sure As Hell Not Get Rich Quick Flip back to the previous paragraph. Four years of blogging to get where I am. If you think blogging is going to generate a ton of leads overnight, I’m sorry to upset you, blogging is a slow but sure marketing method. Once you get traction, and the search engines have a body of work for you, it’s a very low impact, always…

This post was originally published at wpdude.com Many people are more than happy to squirrel away tens of thousands in investments for their kids education, but are you also thinking about digital investments for their futures? I own jenny-matthews.com (live) and faye-matthews.com (currently parked). I bought and host these domains for my daughters as a digital investment for their future. In this post I want to talk about my thinking behind this investment. Why I Think Personal Domains Will Be Important The ability to own you own digital identity and use it to further your personal goals will be huge in the future. I call it a digital persona. If you can build a platform to support your work and life goals that you control and that can move with you through life regardless of which company you work for, or if you are self employed will be huge…

I was reading an excellent book recently by Colin Wright called Start a Freedom Business. In it he talks about not only earning money from your business but earning back time. It’s well worth a read, and at 77p for the Kindle edition it’s a steal. In this post I want to talk about business design for the solopreneur and how you can earn back time something that really resonates with me. Lifestyle Design As a solopreneur you are ideally positioned to not only design your ideal business, but your ideal lifestyle. If one of the things you would like from your solopreneur business is more time outside of your business to have a life then this is the site for you. I’ll be talking about this extensively and I will be documenting my progress with some of my other very time…

I want to talk about the idea of password protecting your time. If you are with me for the long haul you are going to hear me bleat on about time a lot, I’ll say it again, but a solopreneur has limited time, use it well and guard it from time bandits (completely unrelated link to the Time Bandits film), people who will steal your time and give nothing in return. One thing I do is password protect my time, you need a user ID and password to get access to my time. What’s The Password Kerching, money, only give away your time to your clients in exchange for cold hard cash. Think about your time as you do your computer, create logical/financial access controls to your time. As a solopreneur you will always be battling competing priorities marketing, finances, service or product…